"It's not a venerable institution. It broke down immediately and has been amended many times. After 55 presidential elections, it's time to acknowledge that the presidency is a national office calling for direct election by the American people. With California's leadership, this can happen."

"Anyway, our current system encourages candidates to devote almost all of their time and resources to a handful of swing states. As it stands now, presidential candidates ignore L.A., New York and the majority of the country. During the last election, George W. Bush and John Kerry spent 40% of their money in Ohio and Florida. If your goal was to encourage candidates to spread themselves out, you almost couldn't design a worse system than the one we have now."

"That the Electoral College has “worked” in all but one election since 1888 isn't a good enough reason to stay with the status quo. The college has a perverse impact on campaigns. With no incentive to compete in states that are predictably red or blue, candidates concentrate on the battleground states—only 13 of them in 2004, down from 24 in 1960. That's not the national campaign voters deserve."

"Everyone who remembers 2000 knows that it can lead to the election of the candidate who loses the popular vote as president. But the Electoral College's other serious flaws are perhaps even more debilitating for a democracy. It focuses presidential elections on just a handful of battleground states, and pushes the rest of the nation's voters to the sidelines."

"Using such a system in the last election would have meant Bush won all of Illinois' electoral votes, even though Kerry easily carried the state. If that sounds strange, it's no stranger than Illinois and other populous states being virtually ignored by both parties during the last campaign, since one candidate or the other had them locked so early. That likely hurt the turnout in those noncompetitive states, affecting elections further down the ticket."

"Opponents argue that the current system ensures that smaller states continue to have a say in setting national policy. But the U.S. Senate already gives Delaware every bit as much clout as California. Any method besides majority vote empowers some citizens at the expense of others and makes the president beholden to minority interests."

"We'd prefer a constitutional amendment simply abolishing the Electoral College, but this state-by-state reform is an achievable second-best solution to a defective product that even the Founding Fathers regarded wearily and warily."

The system has been around since shortly after the nation’s founding, and its backers say it’s worked well with only a few exceptions: 1824, 1876, 1888 and 2000. That’s pretty near every single time.And that’s the issue. Almost is not good enough.

"Under the current, winner-take-all system, each state's electoral votes go to the candidate who prevails in that state's popular vote. Since even the smallest states get at least three electoral votes, smaller states have a disproportionately large voice. For instance, an electoral vote in Wyoming represents 164,594 people, but in California, it covers 615,848 people."

"The system aims not just for majority rule but rule by certain kinds of majorities . It encourages candidates to form coalitions of states with various political interests and cultures. Such coalitions can be assembled only by a politics of accommodation. So the electoral college system discourages attempts to build narrow ideological or geographical majorities."

"It is no accident that the Founders chose to elect the president by counting votes in the states, since they wanted to emphasize that this is a federal republic with sovereignty shared between the states and Washington. Past efforts to abolish the Electoral College have foundered on the objections of small states, which worry that they would be ignored in the pursuit of giant voting blocs in big population centers. Have their claims no merit?"

"Legal scholars differ on whether state laws requiring electors to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged are constitutional. But because the power of legislatures to choose the method of selecting electors is plenary, there is no question that the Constitution would permit faithless lawmakers to exit the NPVIC. If one or more states did so, and it affected the outcome of the election, the result would be a political crisis that would make 2000 look tame."

"Close elections would become a national nightmare instead of challenges in just one or two states. The parties and the media would find it difficult to monitor recounts and litigation around the country. Unlike tallies in other nations, these counts are largely conducted by partisan officials, something not likely to inspire trust."

It is the Electoral College - standing alone - that prevents us from becoming a European-style, popular-vote, multi-party country with weak, coalition governments. By their very definition, that tells the world that no one really won, creates uncertainty, and tempts the country’s enemies. If we were Germany, President Clinton (43 percent vote) would have had to take Republicans and/or small parties into a weak, do-nothing coalition. Instead, he won a majority in the Electoral College.

"SB 46 would render Colorado irrelevant. Why would a candidate waste time and resources, here, to pick up a relatively small differential when 25 million votes are at stake in New York and California?"

"Al Gore, if he had won Florida, would have captured 8 of the 10 largest states and won the election by appealing mostly to urban and coastal constituencies. George Bush demonstrated broader support in the electoral college appealing to states in the north, south, east, and west. Bush, even though narrowly losing the popular vote, proved himself a much more national candidate."

"One wonders if the direct election of presidents is really the beginning of an effort to bring national government under the control of large and liberal states. &#91;...&#93; It contradicts our constitutional republic's state and federal government sharing of powers. Choosing presidents is one of our states' powers, and we should not remove it to begin a centralized national American government."

"So the states should choose on what basis its electors cast their ballots based on that state's sovereign preferences. In 48 states it's winner take all. But for Pennsylvania, or any state, to relinquish its sovereignty to the popular vote compiled from other states is a perversion of federalism. And another blow to states' rights. "

"What will Bay State liberals and Democrats say when the National Popular Vote compact that so many of them endorsed requires Massachusetts electors to line up behind the Republican? Imagine if Massachusetts had been compelled to give its electoral votes in 1972 not to George McGovern, but to Richard Nixon. Or to the first George Bush in 1988, instead of Michael Dukakis. Or to George W. Bush, not John Kerry, in 2004."

"The two-party system that is the underpinning of our form of representative government is supported by the electoral college, which gives each party a reliable base of support and forces them to compete fiercely for swing voters in places where they are of roughly equal strength. That mix of stability and uncertainty is the formula for healthy politics, and changing the formula should not be done casually."

"If there were credible allegations of voter intimidation or fraud in some other state, would you want it to be able to determine where your state's electoral vote went? Probably not. There would be an outcry, and we'd be back to where we are now. The Electoral College has been a mess almost since Day One, but to date, the reform proposals demonstrate only one certainty: There's no good way to fix it."